Kennedy's Secret Pain

Fro

m Franklin Roosevelt on, U.S. Presidents are either mysterious or unmysterious. Among the uncomplicated, unmysterious characters: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. The others — Roosevelt himself, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton (the jury is still out on George W. Bush)--confront a historian with odd opacities of character: neuroses, compulsions, contradictions or (in the cases of Roosevelt and Reagan) an impenetrable geniality. Reagan's biographer Edmund Morris concluded that the man's apparent depthlessness was itself an enigma, a kind of blank, like the whiteness of the whale.

In An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (Little, Brown; 838 pages), historian Robert Dallek has bravely set himself the task of trying, 40 years and a thousand books after Dallas, to reassemble the pieces of the Kennedy puzzle — essentially, to bridge the considerable distance between the dark side and the somewhat tattered radiance of the myth, between the tabloid hedonist and the martyred saint. It has become a familiar problem: How to explain that the irrational, risk-taking Hefnerian who went to bed with the girlfriend of the Mafia boss of Chicago, who routinely lied about his disastrous health and had himself dosed periodically with amphetamine cocktails was, at the same time, that self-possessed rationalist-idealist, the Apollo who demanded, on that bright morning of the age of celebrity, "Ask not what your country can do for you..."? How do the elements of John Kennedy's myth and life compose themselves into a real human being?

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Dallek, author of a balanced two-volume life of Lyndon Johnson, is neither debunker nor hagiologist, but rather a fairly shrewd syncretist with a certain amount of new material to bring to light. Kennedy, it may be, learned concealment from his father and denial from his mother. Jack's hidden life involved not only sexual intimacies with many women but also an enormous quantity of pain and illness. As no biographer before him has done, Dallek has assembled medical records to speculate about the effect of so many ailments and drugs upon Kennedy's conduct in the White House. The first revelation of his ailments, in the Atlantic Monthly late in 2002, drew a collective gasp from presidential historians.

Dallek's verdict is, on the whole, pro-Kennedy. He gives J.F.K. credit for performing well under the pressure of pain and drugs that might have disabled another man. "The records of his maladies for August 1961," writes Dallek, "provide a window into his struggle to remain effectively attentive to the public's business. His stomach and urinary ailments were a daily distraction." He was taking codeine sulfate and procaine for his pain, penicillin for his infection, cortisone for his Addison's and so on. His back was killing him — the steroids had been weakening his spine. "Something as simple as bending over a lectern to read a speech caused him terrible pain. Out of sight of the press, he went up and down helicopter stairs one step at a time."

Does Kennedy's medical condition make him a hero? Or does his years' long concealment of such matters as his life-threatening Addison's disease instead reconfirm the streak of selfish recklessness that was equally evident in his sexual risk taking? If the facts of his health had been known in 1960, of course, Kennedy never would have been elected President. This was a man who, three times before Dallas, had been in such dire physical condition that he was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The presidential biographer Richard Reeves has remarked that "in a lifetime of medical torment, Kennedy was more promiscuous with physicians and drugs than he was with women."

That Dallek has no ax to grind or myth to explode gives his portrait, after all these years, a certain stability and completeness, and, therefore, with all the contradictions, a likeness to life. Like any good biographer, Dallek has grasped Jung's thought that "only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life."